IRI

FPGA Fault Tolerance in Particle Physics Experiments

The increasing use of SRAM-based reconfigurable architectures at important areas of research and development like particle accelerators and space applications brings new, currently partially unattended effects on top. An already well known, but nevertheless important problem of such systems is its susceptibility to radiation which increases in conjunction with particle flux and energy. Unable to prevent these bit failures by the use of extensive shielding, our field of research is to use intelligent algorithms and redundancy features to eliminate each of such effects that may cause a Single Event Functional Interrupt (SEFI) which leads to miscalculation, system failure or an entire system halt.